Iron Soul
by Sojourney
Summary: There was such a thing as chuán zhī qīnshǔ: people who could speak the language of machines, the way most folk spoke the languages of people. Written for @lexigent as part of the @fic-promptly Dreamwidth community.


"What I'm not understanding," Mal said, trying to keep his voice at an even keel, even as a hint of reprimand crept into it. If this were anyone other than his young mechanic, he'd have reminded them sharply just who was the Captain on this boat. "Is what part of 'we ain't got time' seems to be confounding you so, Kaylee. We've gotta be planet-side in the next seven hours, or we ain't getting paid. We've got no time to make a stop at a supply depot, _dǒng ma?_ "

Kaylee pursed her lips in frustration, blowing a strand of hair from her eyes, and squared her shoulders. "I know we've got somewhere to be, Captain," she answered. "But it's my job to let you know when _Serenity_ is hurtin', and that's what she's telling me now. That's why you've got me on board."

"I got you on board to keep _Serenity_ from hurtin' so bad she can't fly," Mal corrected, pinching a nerve between his temples that was beginning to tighten. Their client wasn't a particularly understanding woman, and had more than enough resources to make their lives miserable for the foreseeable future if they didn't deliver this cargo. Patience, by contrast, could be a kindly aunt figure in comparison to Lei Ting. " _Shíliù jìnǚ zài dìyù_ ," he groaned. "What, _exactly_ , is she telling you?"

There wasn't a trace of mockery in the words; he meant it soundly. Damned if he could figure out how she did it quite as well as she did, but he knew Kaylee understood the ship better than anyone else, probably as much as the ones who assembled her at the shipyard at New Burbank, back on Osiris. One of the ranch hands back on Shadow had told Mal as a boy, that there was such a thing as _chuán zhī qīnshǔ_ \- people who could speak the language of machines, the way most folk spoke the languages of people. At the time, he'd thought it was just the fanciful tales old herders told. Most of them hadn't even _been_ on a ship, they were Shadow-born and raised.

Then the Unification War had started, and Mal had watched a female lieutenant named Sloan coax life time and again from communication transceivers that had taken direct shrapnel to their most vital parts. Replacement parts in the dog days of the war were a _hǔ pìguliè zhòu_ to acquire, especially once the Alliance had started interrogating those who'd been involved in smuggling the Independence their supplies. He and Zoë had watched their grizzled old gunnery master, Quinn, push their equipment and their weapons so far past their breaking points, the entire platoon had expected them to melt into slag in their hands... but it didn't happen.

"You reckon ol' Quinn has put some kind of mechanical hoodoo on these things?" Mal had asked his second-in-command once, examining his pulse rifle's heat indicator slide, which had wedged itself into the _critical_ position an hour prior. It had eventually burnt out the red backlight, as if throwing up its non-existent hands, giving up and going home.

" _Tiě xīnlíng_ , sir," Zoë had shrugged. _Iron soul_. There was something a little disturbing about no-nonsense Corporal Zoë Alleyne saying something like that without batting an eye. If Mal had had any doubts on the idea before, they flew out the pressure hatch about that time.

But Kaylee... she was something special, as far as _chuán zhī qīnshǔ_ went.

Mal had just written it off when she'd strung up that brightly coloured hammock in the engine room, not thinking she'd actually _use_ it... but it hadn't taken long before he'd noticed her quarters hatch left open in the wee hours of the morning, and found her not in her room, but sound asleep with _Serenity's_ radion engines thrumming away not ten feet from her.

"You know you got a proper bunk and all, don't you?" he'd asked her the next morning at breakfast.

"Oh, I know," she'd responded brightly, looking as well-rested as anyone who'd ever slept on a feather bed planet-side. "I just like the sound of the coils workin' away, that's all. It's kind of... soothing, you know? Like bein' on a cloud."

"Ain't no clouds in no atmo that thud around like them catalyzers are doing," he said grouchily, because while he was not a mechanic, he'd had to shell out for three of the damned things already, and that sort of stuck in one's head whenever he heard the distinct noise.

"Don't make fun of her, Captain," Kaylee laughed, laying a hand on the nearest metal brace like a caress. "All proper ladies have got their special somethings."

So Mal learned not to blink an eye when he walked past the engine bay doors and saw her in there, even when there was no work to be done. He did, however, do a double-take when he saw her laying across the protective metal sheeting that protected its core. "What in the name of Shadow's clear prairies are you doing up there?" he balked.

"Hi Captain," she said, raising her head to beam at him, undimmed by an ignored swipe of grease on her face. "She's all rumbly today, like she ate something bad. I think one of those fuel cells we picked up at Li Shen's might be _zào yǔ lóu_ ," she said.

In time, everyone learned to go with it. It wasn't like she didn't know what she was doing, after all; even Jayne just shook his head when Kaylee tended to offer quiet praises ("good girl... you did it again") to the ship after one of Wash's fantastical outmaneuvers of an Alliance scout.

 _Tiě xīnlíng_. Iron soul.

"Kaylee!" he bellowed down the corridor, even as Wash read off the incoming trajectory for a rogue scrapper's strafing run. "We're gonna need some extra juice in about 40 seconds, _nǐ míng bái ma?_ "

"On it!" she called back, cheerfully, like they weren't in imminent danger of having holes blown in their rather-necessarily pressurized hull. Thirty-five seconds later, Wash whooped loudly as the cockpit's console displays lit up with an unprecedented surge of power, maxing out the gauges that were never designed to register something so efficient, and the telltale green tracers of _Serenity's_ drive soon left the scrappers well behind.

Mal felt some of the tension bleed out of him, and moved his thumb away from the trigger lock on his holstered gun that he didn't consciously remember settling there. That had been close.

"Good girl," he murmured, and not a one of them could have said whether he'd meant Kaylee, the ship, or both.


End file.
